TAKEAWAY QUOTES

“We are in a place where people don’t agree on the basic facts. An epistemic communities are about creating opportunities for people to know together so they can grow together. The thing that we sort of left out in this book is that it’s important for them to be diverse and dynamic. You can’t be surrounded simply by like-minded or like-raced people. You need to make sure that who is at the table is coming from different sectors, different communities, et cetera to be able to understand what it is that weaves us together and where our mutual interests lie.”

“It’s basically a nerd fest. We consider ourselves to be nerds for social justice and we did this for a couple of different reasons. Essentially, it was born when Angela Glover Blackwell and I—she’s the head of PolicyLink—were at a meeting at the White House and we realized that while we had pretty good ideas about what to do, few people were paying attention because we didn’t have the kind of data that we needed behind the ideas. This created a way to sort of democratize data.”

“Making sure that people understand that there is more than one leverage point; that we need to move the needle on multiple things at the same time; that we need to make sure that people are reentering from the criminal justice system successfully; that we are dealing with immigration reform. We are dealing with gender inequality. We need to get away from the idea that there is a silver bullet for our problems.”

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